'HEROICK VERTUE': HANDEL AND MORELL'S 'JEPHTHA' IN THE LIGHT OF EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY BIBLICAL COMMENTARY AND OTHER SOURCES

Abstract

WITH THESE WORDS from Quintilian, Jean Racine came to the defence of Euripides, an author who in seventeenth-century France had become the object of 'so much contempt'.' Racine ended the preface to his own Iphigenia with this maxim, and it seems an appropriate way to begin a re-examination of a work which, while probably not viewed with 'so much contempt', has nevertheless come in for its share of disapproval. Handel's oratorio Jep/tha has been criticized mainly for what many view as its incompetent libretto. According to Winton Dean and Paul Henry Lang, the weakest part of Thomas Morell's text is his substitution of a happy ending3 for the brutally tragic conclusion found in the original biblical account. Lang judges the final scenes of Jep/tha to be 'nearly fatal to the oratorio', while Dean detects in the ending 'a morbid emphasis on virginity'.4 It is time to take a fresh look at Jephtha, one which gives due consideration to the oratorio's sources and to what Ruth Smith has antlv called its 'intellectual context'.5